Johnson: Spending a creepy, educational day with the dead

Sept. 4, 2013

Updated Sept. 5, 2013 1:01 p.m.

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One of the human figures that are on display at the bodies exhibit, opening at the site of the former Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park, is shown in an running position. MICHAEL GOULDING, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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A couple of the human figures on display at the new bodies exhibit are posed in a dance at the site of the former Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park. MICHAEL GOULDING, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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A full-body human specimen injected with a polymer preservative stands on display at a bodies exhibit. The show features 22 whole-body specimens and more than 260 organs and partial body specimens designed to give visitors an insight into the inner workings of the human body. SHANNON STAPLETON, REUTERS

One of the human figures that are on display at the bodies exhibit, opening at the site of the former Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park, is shown in an running position.MICHAEL GOULDING, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

Midday in Orange County, I have discovered, is the magic hour. One caveat, though: This does not include weekends. Wherever you go at this time on weekdays, it is almost guaranteed there will not be masses and masses of people getting in your way. You can even find a parking space at the beach.

I like to use it to rediscover this place I again call home. This time it was off to Buena Park.

The lure of Knott's Berry Farm, where I have not been since I was a teenager, was strong. Yet I opted, instead, for “Bodies: The Exhibition,” which began a two-year run in the old Movieland Wax Museum building on Beach Boulevard the first of last month.

It being the magic hour, 1 p.m. in this case, I strolled freely to the ticket desk, not another customer in sight, and was greeted warmly by the three people behind the desk.

I plopped down $21.75, and followed the arrows into the first room of the exhibition. Immediately I was confronted by a baby's skull in a glass box.

If you have not yet been to “Bodies,” we need to talk. The baby skull, trust me, is the least of it. The aim of the show, they tell you right up front, is to teach you how your body works, and how different habits affect it.

If you can keep lunch down, I promise you will see and learn more than you would have ever thought 21 bucks could purchase.

I am gawking at and struggling with all manner of baby parts when Amanda Gardner, 23, walks up. She is the docent on duty. This being the magic hour, I ask if maybe I could get a personal tour. She unhesitatingly agrees.

In each room of the exhibition is a full-sized, once-was-a-living-breathing human being. In the same room as the baby skull is the Running Man, my name for the obviously male cadaver, who is posed as if coming out of sprinters' blocks.

Only almost every muscle flies out as if wings, each one splayed as if exploding from the man's body, revealing everything underneath.

“The only thing that is not real,” Amanda Gardner tells me, having noticed my utter shock, “is the eyeballs.”

She explains that the cadavers came to the exhibit through the top medical school in China, which is also the best-in-the-world institution for body preservation.

She tells me that the dead people I am witnessing were adults, most over the age of 60, who died of natural causes.

Once their bodies were acquired, they were placed in a vacuum-sealed apparatus that was filled with acetone. Once the acetone did its work, silicone was pumped in, and invaded even the smallest cells of the body. The Running Man, for example, is completely encased, from brain to big toe, in silicone.

There is so much that to me is disturbing about “Bodies,” but perhaps nothing more so than the skeleton that is holding hands with a man, both of them leaned far back, as if doing the ring-around-the-rosy dance. This, I am certain, will give off a nightmare tonight.

The skeleton, you see, once belonged inside his now-completely-empty-inside dancing partner. Think about that.

I am little different, says Gardner, my docent, than the majority of people at this stage of the exhibit.

“People will say over and over, ‘Tell me this is fake!' When I tell them the truth, their faces change. They realize they are looking at an actual deceased individual, and start walking very fast through the exhibit. It just sinks in that these were once-living people, bones and all.”

Her job, she says, bothers her not at all. She got it by answering an Internet ad. She had just graduated from Cal State Chico with a degree in exercise physiology, so it all kind of fits, she says.

There is not a question she cannot answer. She has her own names for the various cadavers: The Conductor, who holds a baton in his right hand, or Basketball Star for the man, well, shooting the ball.

“I hope they were all at least in their 70s when they departed,” she says as we walk.

Two hundred human beings, she says, were required to stage the exhibition. Only two – full body – females are on display.

Every piece of the human anatomy is on display, from hearts, lungs, femurs and gall bladders. Next to a display of cancer-ridden lungs, a plastic box sits. It is about a quarter-full with boxes of Marlboros, Winstons and assorted other brands of cigarettes customers have tossed in. The Respiratory Gallery is that powerful.

In the Digestive Gallery, a male cadaver, attempting to high-five himself, is split, head to toe, completely in half.

“Children always want to know if that was done with a light saber,” Gardner tells me.

It goes on like this for nearly an hour. Gardner gives me detailed information on each dead person, from the Discus Thrower to the thinly sliced MRI Guy.

I have seen it all, from cancerous uteruses to stroke-ravaged brains. When we reach the exit, Gardner asks if I want to touch maybe a brain, a hand or a femur.

“It feels like a rubber eraser is all,” she says.

I decline, and thank her very much for the tour.

In the end, I am thinking a couple of five things.

The foremost is that I should really apologize to my body for a lot of what I have put it through.

Right behind that is I have to figure out a sure-fire way to make sure no one messes around, and that I go immediately in the ground.

I would absolutely hate to spend eternity dancing with my own skeleton somewhere in a room in Buena Park or anywhere else.

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